guy keren wrote:
because a single computer now runs not one program - but hundreads of programs. the problem with modern developers is that they tend to forget this.
I'm trying to imagine who these people are. Programmers tend to be terribly aware of the exact opposite thanks to modern operating systems that support multiprocessing.
and, surprisingly enough, even large C programs now tend to be complete memory hogs - see firefox/mozilla, evolution, KDE (and its hundreads of utilities), gnome, etc.
Yup, which just goes to show that for complex applications it is the functionality, not the language, that dictates memory use (and for simple ones, who cares).
imagine how they'd look if they were written in a scripting language ;) we'll be unable to open more then one application at a time.
Actually, in a lot of cases they'd have a smaller memory footprint. One of the advantage of an interpreted language is that the program's representation is much smaller (heck, compare C code to the compiled end result). It's very much a time/space trade off. The other trick is that interpreted languages tend to have a larger set of built in functions, which also tends to help to shrink down memory footprint.
Java has a particularly bad rep in this regard because the standard desktop runtime that folks are familiar with does a lot of trading space for efficiency (a questionable call these days), but there are plenty of Java runtimes that do the exact opposite.
i'm not talking about java and dot net - with them, there's an assumption of a single-ask computer to begin with.
? I obviously forgot to read that part of the language manual. Sorry, but there is no such assumption, and if anything a lot of the optimizations that have been put in place in the runtimes would be entirely pointless if there was only one program running.
--Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
